“The Genius of Turner” (THE STUDIO Special Number, 1903); “Hidden
Treasures at the National Gallery,” 1905; “The Water-Colours of J.
M. W. Turner” (THE STUDIO Spring Number, 1909); “Turner’s
Water-Colours at Farnley Hall” (THE STUDIO Special Number, 1912);
Walpole Society’s Vols. I., III., and VI.]
Turner’s first exhibited water-colour, a _View of the Archbishop’s
Palace, Lambeth_ (1790), is a poor imitation of Malton’s least inspired
topographical drawings. But he learned quickly. His _Inside of Tintern
Abbey_, (1794) shows that before he was twenty he could draw and paint
Gothic architecture better than any of the older topographical artists.
His pre-eminence as a topographical draughtsman was firmly established
by 1797, when he had painted such works as the _Lincoln Cathedral_
(1795), _Llandaff Cathedral_ (1796), _Westminster Abbey: St. Erasmus and
Bishop Islip’s Chapel_ (1796), and _Wolverhampton_ (1796).
From 1796 to 1804 Turner’s style changed, chiefly under the influence of
Richard Wilson’s works, which he studied and copied diligently. These
years saw the production of _Norham Castle_ (1798), _Warkworth Castle_
(1799), _Edinburgh, from Calton Hill_ (1804), _The Great Fall of the
Reichenbach_ (done in 1804, but not exhibited till 1815), and the
wonderful sketches in the Alps, _Blair’s Hut_, _St. Gothard_, etc.
(1802). In these energetic and powerful drawings he aims at getting
depth and richness of tone and colour.
From 1804 to 1815 his energies were mainly directed to the production of
his great sea-paintings, _The Shipwreck_, _Spithead_, etc., his lovely
English landscapes like _Abingdon_, _Windsor_, _The Frosty Morning_, and
_Crossing the Brook_, and to making the designs in sepia for his “Liber
Studiorum” and helping to engrave the plates. His water-colours during
these years were not numerous, but they include _Scarborough Town and
Castle_ (1811), _The Strid_ (about 1811), _Bolton Abbey from the South_
(about 1812), all three at Farnley Hall, Mr. Morland Agnew’s
_Scarborough_ (1810), _Scene on the River Tavey_ (1813)--called by Mr.
Ruskin _Pigs in Sunshine_, now in the Ruskin School at Oxford, and the
_Malham Cove_ (about 1815), now in the British Museum (Salting Bequest).
In these drawings the capacities of water-colour are not forced so much
into rivalry with the depth and power of oil painting as in those of the
1797-1804 period.
About 1812 or 1813 Turner began making the drawings which were engraved
and published in Cooke’s “Picturesque Views of the Southern Coast of
England.” Between 1815 and 1840 nearly all his work in
[Illustration: PLATE IV.
(_In the possession of J. F. Schwann, Esq._)
“LAUNCESTON.” BY J. M. W. TURNER, R.A.]
water-colour was done to be engraved and published in similar
undertakings. Turner’s fame as a water-colour painter rested during his
lifetime chiefly on these drawings. Among them are many of the most
beautiful works which have ever been produced in this medium. It is a
pity, therefore, that they are not more adequately represented in our
public galleries. This remark applies particularly to the drawings in
transparent colour (like the _Launceston_, for instance, which is here
reproduced, Plate IV), for those in body-colour--the “Rivers of
France”--are nearly all either in the National Gallery, Ashmolean or
Fitzwilliam Museums. But with the exception of _Hornby Castle_ (V. & A.
Museum) and most of the originals of the “Rivers” and “Ports of England”
series (in the National Gallery), nearly all Turner’s drawings made for
the engravers are in private collections. We may perhaps allow ourselves
to hope that some time in the future a separate gallery may be founded
to do justice to British water-colours, in which such drawings would
have to be properly represented.
After about 1840 Turner only worked in water-colours for his own
pleasure and for that of a small circle of friends and admirers. The
drawings made for his own pleasure are now nearly all in the National
Gallery, where they have never been properly exhibited and where most of
them cannot be seen by the public. These formed part of the Turners
which the Trustees wanted to sell about a year ago. The drawings made
for his friends and admirers include the _Constance_, _Lucerne_, and
others of what have been called “The Epilogue” drawings. The public is
able to catch glimpses of these occasionally at loan exhibitions and in
auction rooms.
JOHN SELL COTMAN
[Born at Norwich, May 16, 1782; went to London, 1798; gained prize for a
drawing from the Society of Arts, 1800; returned to Norwich, 1806, and
opened a school for drawing and design; married, 1809; published a
series of etchings, 1811, and became president of the Norwich Society of
Artists; published “Norman and Gothic Architecture,” 1817, and
“Architectural Antiquities of Normandy,” 1822; Associate, Society of
Painters in Water-Colours, 1825; appointed Professor of Drawing at
King’s College, London, 1834, mainly through Turner’s influence;
published his “Liber Studiorum,” 1838; died July 24, 1842.
EXHIBITED: Royal Academy, 1800-’06; Associated Artists, 1810, ’11;
Society of Painters in Water-Colours, 1825, ’26, ’28-’39; Society
of British Artists, 1838; Norwich Society of Artists, 1807-’12,
’15, ’18, ’20, ’21, ’23, ’24; Norfolk and Suffolk Institution,
1828-’33.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: National Gallery (an oil-painting); V.
and A. Museum (Water-Colours); British Museum; National Galleries
of Scotland and Ireland; Norwich Castle Museum; Manchester
Whitworth Institute, etc.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: Memoir in catalogue of Norwich
Art Circle’s exhibition of Cotman’s works, July 1888; Laurence
Binyon’s “Crome and Cotman” (Portfolio Monograph), 1897, and
“Cotman” in “Masters of English Landscape Painting” (THE STUDIO
Summer Number, 1903).
REPRODUCTIONS: The three works cited above, and histories of
British water-colour painting by Monkhouse, Finberg, etc., already
cited.]
Cotman is the greatest of all the English water-colour painters born
after Turner. He is the only one of them whose works can be put beside
Turner’s and judged on a footing of equality. When we compare Prout,
Cox, De Wint, and even Bonington, with Turner we feel that they must be
judged by some less exacting standard than that which we apply to
Turner. This is not the case with Cotman. He had not the width and
range, the abundance and all-conquering power of Turner, but within his
own limits he is every whit as unapproachable.
Cotman was a member of Girtin’s sketching club, and it is evident that
Girtin’s influence counted for much in his early work. From Girtin he
learned to rely first and foremost upon full-bodied washes of colour
placed exactly where they were wanted and left to dry just as they had
flowed from the brush. Cotman’s quite early works can easily be mistaken
for poor drawings by Girtin or Francia. But in the drawings produced
between 1803 and 1817, we find that he was not satisfied to paint, like
the older men, in his studio upon an arbitrarily chosen formula of
colouring. In a letter written to Dawson Turner on Nov. 30, 1805, he
speaks of his summer sketching tour to York and Durham, and adds, “My
chief study has been colouring from Nature, many of which are close
copies of that full Dame.” We see one of the results of these studies in
what is perhaps his earliest masterpiece, the _Greta Bridge, Yorkshire_
(1806), now in the British Museum. Its colour-scheme is as original as
it is beautiful. The colouring is “natural,” but it is Nature simplified
to a system of harmoniously coloured spaces, in which light and shade
and modelling are suggested rather than rendered.
The distinctive peculiarity of the workmanship of this, as indeed of all
Cotman’s drawings, is his reliance on the clear stain or rich blotting
of the colour on paper preserved in all its freshness. The aims of
representation are forced so much into the background that the artist
seems to be mainly intent on the discovery and display of “the beauty
native and congenial” to his materials. Mr. Binyon has drawn attention
to the unconscious similarity of Cotman’s methods and aims to those of
the great schools of China and Japan of more than a thousand years ago.
Among the better-known of Cotman’s drawings of this period we may
mention the _Twickenham_ (1807), _Trentham Church_ (about 1809),
_Draining Mill, Lincolnshire_ (1810), and _Mousehold Heath_ (1810);
these are all reproduced in “Masters of English Landscape Painting” (THE
STUDIO Summer Number, 1903), in which Mr. Binyon’s illuminating essay
was published. The beautiful drawing of _Kirkham Abbey, Yorkshire_, here
reproduced (Plate III) by the courtesy of Messrs. J. Palser & Sons, is
an admirable example of Cotman’s wonderful mastery in the use of decided
washes of pure colour.
In 1817 Cotman made his first visit to Normandy, and after this date his
colour becomes warmer, brighter, and more arbitrary. After about 1825 he
indulges himself freely in the use of the strong primary colours,
influenced probably by Turner’s daring chromatic experiments.
DAVID COX
[Born at Deritend, Birmingham, April 29, 1783; scene-painter in London,
1804; President of the “Associated Artists,” 1810; member of the Society
of Painters in Water-Colours, 1813; drawing-master at Hereford,
1814-1826; published “Treatise on Landscape Painting,” 1814, “Lessons in
Landscape,” 1816, “Young Artists’ Companion,” 1825, etc.; took lessons
in oil painting from W. J. Müller, 1839; removed to neighbourhood of
Birmingham, 1841, visiting Bettws-y-Coed yearly, 1844-1856; died June 7,
1859.
EXHIBITED: Royal Academy, 1805-’08; ’27-’29, ’43, ’44; Associated
Artists, 1809-’12; Society of Painters in Water-Colours, 1813-’16,
’18-’59; British Institution, 1814, ’28, ’43; Society of British
Artists, 1841, ’42.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: National Gallery; V. and A. Museum
(Water-Colours); British Museum; National Galleries of Scotland and
Ireland; Birmingham Art Gallery; Manchester Whitworth Institute;
Glasgow, Manchester, Bury, Nottingham Art Galleries, etc.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: “Memoir of the Life of David
Cox,” by N. Neal Solly, 1875; Wedmore’s “Studies in English Art,”
2nd series.
REPRODUCTIONS: Solly’s “Memoir”; Masters of English Landscape
Painting (THE STUDIO Summer Number, 1903); “Drawings of David Cox”
(Newnes’s “Modern Master Draughtsmen” Series).]
It was not till about 1840, when he was fifty-seven years of age, that
Cox managed to break free from the drudgery of teaching. This drudgery
during the greater part of his life undoubtedly exercised a mischievous
effect upon his art. Besides wasting so much of his time, and thus
preventing him from attempting works which required sustained efforts,
it forced him to develop a mechanical and facile dexterity of style. He
got into the habit of “slithering” over the individual forms of objects,
making his rocks and trees as rounded and shapeless as his clouds, in a
way that irritates any one who has learned to use his eyes. There is
some truth in John Brett’s remark that “the daubs and blots of that
famous sketcher (David Cox) were just definite enough to suggest ... the
most superficial aspects of things,” though it may have been prompted by
envy and exasperation.
Cox’s reputation nowadays rests to a large extent on the drawings he
made after 1840. _Hayfield with Figures_, _The Young Anglers_ (1847),
the _Welsh Funeral_ (1850), _The Challenge_ (1853), and _Snowden from
Capel Curig_ (1858) were among the fine things produced by the grand old
artist during the last years of his life. Such moving and powerful
works are stamped with the sincerity, simplicity, and rugged dignity of
David Cox’s own character.
SAMUEL PROUT
[Born at Plymouth, Sep. 17, 1783; settled in London, 1811; member of the
Society of Painters in Water-Colours, 1819; published “Rudiments of
Landscape,” etc., 1813, “A New Drawing Book for the Use of Beginners,”
1821, and other drawing books; published lithographs of his Continental
drawings, The Rhine, 1824, Flanders and Germany, 1833, France,
Switzerland, and Italy, about 1839; died at Denmark Hill, Feb. 1852.
EXHIBITED: Royal Academy, 1803-’05, ’08-’10, ’12-’14, ’17, ’26,
’27; British Institution, 1809-’11, ’16-’18; Associated Artists,
1811, ’12; Society of Painters in Water-Colours, 1815-’51.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: National Gallery; V. and A. Museum
(Water-Colours); British Museum; National Galleries of Scotland and
Ireland; Fitzwilliam and Ashmolean Museums; Manchester Whitworth
Institute; Birmingham, Manchester, Bury Art Galleries, etc.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: Ruskin, in “Art Journal,” 1849,
“Modern Painters,” and “Notes on S. Prout and W. Hunt”; Roget’s
“History of the Old Water-Colour Society,” 1891; “D. N. B.,”
“Sketches by Samuel Prout” (THE STUDIO Winter Number, 1914-’15),
with text by E. G. Halton.
REPRODUCTIONS: Ruskin’s “Notes,” etc., 1879-’80; “Sketches by
Samuel Prout” (THE STUDIO Winter Number, 1914-’15).]
Up to 1819 Prout’s work was confined to the making of English
topographical drawings and marine subjects. They show Girtin’s influence
mainly, and they are stolid, heavy-handed, and rather dull.
In 1819 Prout went to France, and in 1821 to Belgium and the Rhine
provinces. The drawings made from his sketches appeared in the
exhibitions of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours and attracted a
great deal of interest and admiration, partly on account of their novel
subject-matter--for the public was beginning to weary of the numberless
views of Tintern Abbey, Harlech, Conway and Carnarvon Castles, and other
English subjects, with which it had been surfeited during the preceding
twenty years--and partly on account of Prout’s boldness of manner and
marked feeling for the picturesque. Having struck this successful vein
of subject-matter Prout continued to work it till the end of his life,
producing a great quantity of water-colours of Continental buildings,
all executed on the same general principles, and several series of
admirable lithographs from his sketches and drawings.
Ruskin liked Prout and admired his work inordinately. In “Modern
Painters” he calls him “a very great man”--which is absurd--and says
that his rendering of the character of old buildings is “as perfect and
as heartfelt as I can conceive possible.” Some people may prefer the
buildings in Turner’s early drawings, in Cotman’s, Girtin’s, and
Bonington’s works. But Prout’s work is uniformly successful within its
own limitations; it is bold, workmanlike, and picturesque, and its
subject-matter is full of inexhaustible interest and delight.
PETER DE WINT
[Born at Stone, Staffordshire, Jan. 21, 1784; apprenticed to John
Raphael Smith, 1802; student R. A. Schools, 1809; Associate, Society of
Painters in Water-Colours, 1810, member, 1811, and 1825; died at 40
Upper Gower Street, June 30, 1849.
EXHIBITED: Royal Academy, 1807, ’11, ’13-’15, ’19, ’20, ’28;
British Institution, 1808, ’13-’17, ’21, ’24; Associated Artists,
1808, ’09; Society of Painters in Water-Colours, 1810-’15, ’25-’49.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: V. and A. Museum (Oil and
Water-Colours); British Museum; National Galleries of Scotland and
Ireland; Manchester Whitworth Institute; Birmingham, Manchester,
Glasgow, Bury, Norwich, Nottingham Art Galleries, etc.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: Sir Walter Armstrong’s “Peter De
Wint,” 1888; Roget’s “History,” etc.; “D. N. B.”
REPRODUCTIONS: Armstrong’s “De Wint”; “Masters of English Landscape
Painting” (THE STUDIO Special Summer Number, 1903).]
De Wint’s work may be described as a cross between that of Girtin and
Cotman. Girtin was his first source of inspiration. From him he learned
the value of breadth of effect and simplicity of design. From Cotman he
learned to distil his colour harmonies from Nature. As a draughtsman he
was less of a mannerist than Girtin, and he had not Cotman’s marvellous
feeling for the beauties of abstract design.
De Wint had Dutch blood in his veins, and he had a good deal of the
Dutchman’s solidity of character and stolid realism. His drawings always
look like bits of real life. They are nearer to the common experience of
Nature than either Turner’s, Cozens’, Girtin’s, or Cotman’s works. But
his homely realism is always restrained by his respect for the medium he
worked in and by his innate sense of style.
His work is well represented in the Victoria and Albert Museum by
drawings like _Bray on the Thames, from the Towing Path_, _Hayfield_,
_Yorkshire_, and _Westmoreland Hills, bordering the Ken_, all lent to
that Museum from the National Gallery; and of his famous works in
private collections we may mention _Cookham-on-Thames_, recently in the
Beecham Collection, _The Thames from Greenwich Hill_, once in the
collection of James Orrock, and _Near Lowther Castle_.
For all his “objectivity,” his steadiness of poise, his calm strength of
character, De Wint’s work is intensely personal and original. The number
of admirers of his manly and felicitous work has steadily increased
since his death, and can only go on increasing as the public gets more
opportunities of seeing his noble works with their superb mosaic of
rich, deep, and harmonious colour.
RICHARD PARKES BONINGTON
[Born at Arnold, near Nottingham, October 25, 1802; received some
instruction from Francia at Calais, 1817; studied at the Louvre and
Institute, and under Baron Gros, at Paris; first exhibited at the
Salon, 1822; made lithographs for Baron Taylor’s “Voyages Pittoresques
dans l’ancienne France,” “Vues Pittoresques de l’Ecosse” (1826) and
other works; visited England with Delacroix, 1825; died during a visit
to England, 1828.
EXHIBITED: Salon (Paris), 1822 (Water-Colours), ’24
(Water-Colours), ’27 (Oils and Water-Colours); Royal Academy, 1827,
’28; British Institution, 1826-’29.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: Louvre; National Gallery; National
Portrait Gallery (a small drawing of himself); V. and A. Museum
(Oil and Water-Colours); British Museum; Wallace Collection;
Manchester Whitworth Institute; Nottingham, Birmingham, Manchester,
and Glasgow Art Galleries; National Gallery of Ireland.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: “Annual Register” and
“Gentleman’s Magazine,” 1828; Cunningham’s “Lives,” etc.;
Redgrave’s “Dictionary”; THE STUDIO, Nov. 1904; Catalogue of
Bonington’s Lithographs, by Aglaüs Bonvenne (Paris), 1873;
“Influence de Bonington et de l’Ecole Anglaise sur la Peinture de
Paysage en France,” by A. Dubuisson (Walpole Society’s Vol. II.).
REPRODUCTIONS: “Series of Subjects from Bonington’s Works,”
lithographed by J. D. Harding (twenty-one plates), 1828;
Monkhouse’s and Hughes’s works cited above.]
Bonington was the most brilliant of the later school of topographical
artists--those who used the full resources of water-colour for the
production of pictorial effects. The drawings he produced during his
short life--for he died at twenty-six, may be divided into purely
topographical subjects, like the _Street in Verona_ (V. and A. Museum);
river and coast scenes, like the _Rouen_ (Wallace Collection); and
figure subjects, in which historical costume played the chief part, like
the _Meditation_ and several other drawings in the Wallace Collection.
His drawings are amazingly dexterous, firm and large in handling, finely
composed, and wonderfully rich in tone and colour. His influence on
English artists was considerable, particularly on W. J. Müller, T.
Shotter Boys, and William Callow.
As he worked mostly in Paris his best paintings and drawings are
generally to be found in the French private collections. That is
probably why he is better known and more warmly appreciated in France
than in England. An authoritative book on Bonington’s life and work is
much needed. Just before the war broke out it was rumoured that a work
of this kind, the joint production of Monsieur A. Dubuisson and Mr. C.
E. Hughes, was about to be published by Mr. John Lane. Such a work will
be doubly welcome, for it will help us to realize the amazing quantity
of work Bonington managed to produce in his short life, and its
wonderful quality; and it should benefit Bonington’s reputation by
drawing attention to the large number of drawings and paintings to
which, in our public and private collections, his name is wrongly and
ignorantly given.
MYLES BIRKET FOSTER
[Born at North Shields, February 4, 1825, of an old Quaker Family;
educated at the Quaker Academy at Hitchin, Herts, where he had lessons
from Charles Parry, the drawing master; apprenticed to Ebenezer
Landells, the wood-engraver, 1841-1846; engaged chiefly on
book-illustration till 1858, after that time devoted mostly to painting;
Associate “Old” Water-Colour Society, 1860, member, 1862; painted in
oils 1869-1877, after which he abandoned it in favour of water-colours;
died at Weybridge, March 27, 1899.
EXHIBITED: Royal Academy, 1859, ’69-’77, ’81; Society of Painters
in Water-Colours, 1860-’99; Society of British Artists, 1876; Royal
Scottish Academy, 1871, ’75.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: National Gallery; V. and A. Museum
(Water-Colours); Birmingham, Manchester, and Bury Art Galleries.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: “Art Annual,” 1890; “Athenæum,”
April 1, 1899; “D. N. B.” (Supplement); “Birket Foster,” by H. M.
Cundall, 1906.
REPRODUCTIONS: “Art Annual,” 1890; Cundall’s “Birket Foster.”]
In his choice of subjects Birket Foster confined himself generally to
roadside and woodland scenes, and in these he sought prettiness rather
than the deeper and more profoundly poetical emotions. His work is neat
and extraordinarily accomplished, but his style being always the same
made its many merits seem mechanical and unfeeling. Unlike the older men
he avoided the use of broad washes of transparent colour, used
body-colour freely, and finished his work with elaborate stipplings.
His standard of excessive finish, his general methods of work and choice
of subject-matter, were violently opposed to those of the younger men
who came after him. For this reason, and also because of the great
popularity he enjoyed, Birket Foster’s work has excited the animosity of
“superior persons” and æsthetes. But their cheap and easy sneers merely
mark the inevitable reaction which follows a period of indiscriminating
praise. Doubtless Birket Foster was not the great artist his
contemporaries thought him to be. But his work must figure in any
well-balanced history of British landscape painting, if only because it
expresses so fully and abundantly, and with so much technical success,
the artistic ideals of a large part of the nineteenth century. But it
also deserves consideration for other reasons. Birket Foster’s grace and
prettiness were the results of his sincere and unaffected love of the
orderliness and real beauty of the life of the English countryside. He
had a genuine affection for the themes he painted, and he painted them
in the way he thought best. Fashions in technical matters change, slowly
perhaps but inevitably, and I shall be very much surprised if the future
will not be readier than we are to-day to give Birket Foster’s work its
due meed of affectionate admiration.
ALFRED WILLIAM HUNT
[Born in Bold Street, Liverpool, Nov. 15, 1830; educated at Liverpool
Collegiate School and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, which he
entered with a scholarship, 1848; a fellow of Corpus, 1853-1861;
Associate of Liverpool Academy, 1854, member, 1856; Associate Society of
Painters in Water-Colours, 1862, member, 1864; died May 3, 1896.